Relevant Field
The present disclosure relates to patient care. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to a system and apparatus for electronic patient care.
Description of Related Art
Providing patient care in a hospital generally necessitates the interaction of numerous professionals and caregivers (e.g., doctors, nurses, pharmacists, technicians, nurse practitioners, etc.) and any number of medical devices/systems needed for treatment of a given patient. Despite the existence of systems intended to facilitate the care process, such as those incorporating electronic medical records (“EMR”) and computerized provider order entry (“CPOE”), the process of providing comprehensive care to patients including ordering and delivering medical treatments, such as medications, is associated with a number of non-trivial issues.
Despite the existence of systems incorporating electronic medical records (“EMR”) and computerized provider order entry (“CPOE”), the process of ordering and delivering medical treatments still has the potential to cause critical information to be miscommunicated, to allow treatment decisions to be made without ready access to complete information, and to delay implementation of treatment orders due to unnecessarily redundant and inefficient procedures.
Medication errors may be responsible for over 300 deaths and may injure over one million people each year in the United States. Hospitals under financial stress may experience an increased incidence of medication errors. Medications associated with the most dangerous errors include insulin, narcotics, heparin and chemotherapy. Sources of error include administering the wrong drug, the wrong concentration of drug, at the wrong rate, or via the wrong route (medications can be administered orally, intravenously, intramuscularly, subcutaneously, rectally, topically to the skin, via the eye or ear, intrathecally, intraperitoneally or even intravesically). Even with proper orders and proper labeling, medications still can be administered improperly because of illegible handwriting, miscommunication of orders, and mispronunciation of drugs having similar names. The trend toward the use of electronic medical records (EMR) and bar coding systems for medications has been shown to reduce the incidence of medication errors. EMR systems, for example, can facilitate computerized provider order entry (CPOE) and flag orders for drugs that do not match a patient's characteristics such as diagnosis, allergies, weight or age. However, these systems have not been widely adopted and their implementation can result in significant delays and inefficiencies in ordering, preparing and administering medications.
It has been estimated that medication infusion devices are involved in up to one third of all medication errors that result in significant harm. The wrong drug may be hung, incorrect parameters (e.g. drug concentration or rate of infusion) may be entered, or existing infusion parameters may be improperly changed. Of infusion pump-related deaths, nearly half may be due to user error and most of these may be due to errors in programming the infusion device.
An effective monitoring system should monitor and intercede at any phase of the medication ordering and administration process to help minimize any of a number of adverse events that could result from the treatment. The medication treatment process conceptually can be separated into three phases: a prescription phase, a medication preparation phase, and an administration phase. Errors can occur when a prescription is written or entered, when a drug is retrieved for use or mixed in solution, or when it is administered to the patient. It would be particularly desirable for a monitoring system to not significantly impair the efficiency with which medications are ordered, prepared or administered, and preferably to actually reduce the time required to perform those activities by collecting, organizing and presenting relevant information for analysis.